Specify name for VM during catalog request

[AllBlack]

Hi,

Is it at all possible to specify a name for a VM when you request a catalog item?
From what I can see we can specify a prefix but that does not conform with our naming conventions.

What vCAC seems to give me is <prefix><number> but what I need is <prefix><somename><number>.

Cheers

[GrantOrchardVMw]

There is a vCO workflow for that but I can't find it right now. I'll share it when I head into the office tomorrow.

Grant

[AllBlack]

Thanks Grant.

It seems you can also just add a custom property of "hostname" to blueprint which then allows you to specify name during provisioning.

[GrantOrchardVMw]

Yep, you definitely can, but that *may* put you in a position of using identical names. Just something to be aware of.

Grant

[poorem]

I worked with a customer who wanted to do this too. As Grant says, it could lead to duplicate names. If you’re going to do it, it’d be sensible to include some checks in the BuildingMachine WF stub to reduce the likelihood of a duplicate name getting used.

[qc4vmware]

We bypass the vCAC system for this altogether.  We have built workflows which allow much more complex and customizable hostname generation along with just flat out specifying a name.  You could take advantage of something like that during the building machine workflow callout.  We allow for creating prefixes which include tokens that can be replaced so your blueprint might have a custom property called "customPrefix" and populate it with something like thisistheprefix-@username@-@next@ .  We keep a table of any prefixes that have been used along with the last value that was used.  So this would end up being something like thisistheprefix-myusername-01 .  We also have a validation routine that checks hostnames for existence in our environment based on several different criteria regardless of whether they were automatically generated or manually entered.

[AllBlack]

Thanks guys,

This is just for a quick and dirty POC. Not even sure if I get to implement VCAC at this stage but I like what I see.

In production, I'd definitely would require those checks in place. As I am new to VCAC and have limited knowledge of VCO, could you go into a bit more detail?

Would I build a complete new workflow in VCO and then call it from VCAC? Or could I just use Powershell scripts instead of VCO? Or can I modify build-in create/clone workflow in VCAC to achieve this?

[nubronco]

Check this out http://dailyhypervisor.com/vcloud-automation-center-vcac-5-2-custom-hostnaming-extension/ I just worked with PSG and we used this to create the names for our VMs. We made some tweaks but this should get you started.